(Martin Collins is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is the author/editor of several books on space history and on science, technology, and society in the twentieth century, including Space Race: The US-USSR Competition to Reach the Moon (1999). A Chapter in the Book: Remembering the Space Age – Chapter 11 “A Second Nature rising: Spaceflight in an era of Representation” – http://www.nss.org/resources/library/spacepolicy/Remembering_the_Space_Age.pdf)
Let’s shake this mix of semiotics, capitalism, spaceflight, the global and the local, and consider a couple of examples. In public discourse on globalization, capitalism—restless, u.S. and european-centric, with asia on the rise—has drawn the most attention. But the u.S. military, as already inferred, has played an essential part, creating seemingly strange linkages between national security and a rampant transnational consumer culture. Consider the example of the global positioning System (GPS), a network of satellites designed and operated by the u.S. air Force (uSaF). Conceived in the early 1970s and only becoming fully operational in 1995, gpS’s history straddled the Cold War and its market-oriented aftermath. the system provided a soldier, ship, airplane, or missile with information on their exact position anyplace on the planet via signals encoded with highly accurate time data, its profound effects symbolized by its use in guiding “smart” bombs and missiles with deadly, precise accuracy in the post-September 11 conflicts in afghanistan and Iraq.26 In recent years, satellite photographic images of these “smart” actions have been a staple of television news and are widely available on the Internet.27 In the 1990s, though, GPS became not just a tool for the u.S. military, but for anyone, anywhere in the world—for a hiker in the rocky Mountains, for mom and dad driving the family car, as well as for past and present adversaries such as a Chinese soldier or a terrorist. In its posture toward users, the system became egalitarian in the extreme. Not surprisingly, in the go-go market-driven post-Cold War world, business and consumer use of gpS vastly outstripped that of the military. Imagine a use for location, tracking, or accurate time information and one found gpS there, often in the intimate contours of daily life— say, tracking a spouse suspected of having an affair. Indeed, one can “google” a phrase such as “cheater tracker” and find gpS products marketed for that purpose. Combined with a geographic information system (such as satellite-based google maps), one can track and visualize the itinerary of an errant mate.28 Such uses are not just confined to the u.S.: as the New York Times observed, “the world has incorporated our gpS into its daily life as rapidly as americans took up the atM banking network.”29 Nothing, perhaps, speaks more to the distinctive conjunction between production and semiotics in the global era, to the total, actual, not merely metaphorical, planetary scale of this conjunction, than GPS, its radio signals equally available to friends and foes, to weapons in flight, and to off-the-shelf products offering to meet every consumer need. the gpS story is not the same as that by-gosh, by-golly story of the origins of the Internet—of “isn’t it strange that a research project into maintaining command and control during a nuclear holocaust gave us this wildly diverse, unpredictable, electronic social universe.” It is different and more revealing of the transformation in the world order since the early 1970s. It still is, in essence, controlled by the u.S. military, and in a way unprecedented in u.S. history unites a classic function of empire—controlling and maintaining its perimeters—with the churning demands of capital and consumer appetites. and not just those based in united States, but everywhere. gpS has become a military-consumerist hybrid, in which each political-cultural domain has continually redefined the other. We—a transnational we—know the precision bomb blast from afghanistan or Iraq and the “cheater tracker” originate in and depend on the same system of production, yet in our everyday cultural frame of semiotics, we allow them to maintain their separateness. It is tensions such as these that continually redefine the global and the local, geographically and in time, and keep the united States—and its preeminence and exploitation of spaceflight— in the center of this dialectic. Consider another example, drawn from my current research that tracks Boorstin’s concern about semiotics and the structuring of our sense of the real. Like gpS, Iridium was and is a satellite constellation that completely embraces the planet—but with a different purpose, to provide telephony and data services, and with a different institutional actor in the lead, a multinational corporation. Conceived in 1987 at Motorola, a Fortune 500 company and a leading firm in cellular phone equipment and systems business and in semiconductors, the Iridium satellite project seemed to epitomize the historical moment: as the Cold War waned and collapsed, markets rather than government would lead into a techno-democratic future, and corporations rather than nations would articulate the pathways through which the local and the global took shape. the largest privately-financed technology project ever undertaken, and with an array of international investors, including the newly constituted russian Federation and the people’s republic of China, Iridium stood as symbol of this fusion of technology, corporations, markets, and international politics. In 1998, as the system neared completion, Wired magazine proclaimed, “It’s a bird, it’s a phone, it’s the world’s first pan-national corporation able to leap geo-political barriers in a single bound. part of my challenge in untangling this story has been to understand the varied ways in which semiotics functioned in a multinational corporation (MNC). You might expect that a MNC, deep-pocketed, well-connected politically, at home and internationally, with tens of factory and sales sites around the world would be an instrumental historical actor extraordinaire, a big “them” guy able to exert power in ways unavailable to all the little “us” guys. and, of course, that crude truth is there. But so is another one, one in which Motorola regarded the semiotic realm as real, a reality that required substantive corporate responses that intermingled culture, politics, and identity. as a literally planetary project, incorporating flesh-and-blood actors from around the world, Iridium dramatically highlighted the problem of semiotics—local, global, multiple, contesting, and not readily controlled—and the need for solutions. the Motorola’s response to this condition can be glimpsed in a 1998 book entitled Uncompromising Integrity: Motorola’s Global Challenge.31 the concept of culture stood as organizing precept. the narrative provided definitions of culture and related concepts that showed it as a structure, but varied in place and time, and as a process—national culture, subculture, host culture, enculturation, and transcultural. two key additional notions situated the discussion in the corporate context: “Motorola culture” and “home culture.” the first made clear that the organization had a semiotic sphere, derived from its own history and as a U.S. - centered capitalist institution. the second that that sphere was permeable and in flux because employees hailed from many localities around the world and because, as a multinational, the corporation always was operating in someone else’s backyard. Culture was something around which a company had to define itself (Motorola culture). Yet, in the global age, “home” was complex and mobile, reflective of the world’s many diasporas—of people, individually and en masse, following the flow lines of capital. home inhered in individuals even as they moved (with Motorola employees themselves an example) and in those places from which they came. Motorola and home cultures were oppositional and profoundly interpenetrating.32 Uncompromising Integrity’s preoccupation with culture—perceived as variegated and everywhere, in specific geographical places, in institutions (including Motorola), in individuals, and pulsing through the many channels of the media—had a corporate history. It encapsulated more than 15 years of high-level managerial attention to the global. It led executives in the late 1980s to create a hybrid academic-corporate institution—Motorola university—to engage and comprehend the fauna and flora of culture-world. this book was a product of that—a Motorola university press publication! Lest this example seem quirky and isolated, note that it exemplified a larger trend: over a decade, from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s, more than a thousand corporate universities were created in the united States—all of which were a response, in one fashion or another, to the perceived challenge of culture and semiotics to transnational business practice.33 the biography of the lead author—r. S. Moorthy—makes concrete some of the issues of identity and politics embedded in these developments. Born into an Indian family and raised in poverty in Malay, as a young man he found work in a Motorola facility in that country. his professional life at Motorola became one of reconciling his origins in a place with a specific history, one tied to colonialism and the new globalism, with the purposes and outlooks of a multinational firm. he found a way to marry his interests with Motorola’s culture preoccupation and he came to play a major role in establishing Motorola university, creating a subunit of that enterprise, the Center for Culture and technology. this vignette only is meant to suggest the complicated and non-obvious ways in which social boundaries got created and negotiated and how semiotics constrained and enabled this process at different levels of corporate activity. as one instance, consider this graphic (see figure) outlining the manufacturing flow for the Iridium project, one that required a transnational “virtual factory”— Motorola’s own phrase. In the lower right corner, we find included in the virtual factory Baikonaur, Kazakhstan and taiyuan, China. that Kazakhstan and China could be integral, functioning elements of a u.S.-based business project made sense only in the context of this belief in the everywhere-ness of culture and the reality of semiotic structures—whether in dealing with transnational elites or with questions of politics and identity in specific geographic locales. But as the project moved from planning and manufacturing execution to marketing, the instrumental view—think the way I, Iridium, want you to think, buy my phone—comes to the fore and you find a different way of presenting geographical specificity and cultural accommodation, bleached and abstracted back to the aims of the corporation and neo-liberal capitalism, and using enlightenment universals to facilitate those aims.34 Where do these examples leave us? What might we draw from this mix of state action and capitalism, of semiotics and on-the-ground practice, of geographical specificity, local meanings, and the meta-narratives of the West? and where does spaceflight fit into this contested field of action? I would point to two things. First, my recitation here advances a particularly modest claim: deep and important issues become visible when we recalibrate our interpretive lens and see spaceflight in history, rather than expecting it to be sui generis. Spaceflight—especially those near-earth applications cited here—has been a major element in creating the incarnation of the global we have experienced over the last 40 years. It has provided images and practices that have made the category of the global, natural and insistent, even when different actors give it different meanings. It has been a primary site in which prior categories of the modern—the nation state, the military, civil society, capitalism—have been refashioned and given new meanings. and in helping to elevate the importance of the global—to distribute its effects across regions and places, to recalibrate our sense of distance and time, of identity as a creation of community or the flows of transnational semiotics—it has helped to invigorate the meaning of the local. This has led to an intensified scrutiny of globalism’s origins in the West— emanating from its military, economic, political and cultural institutions—and in its ideological underpinnings, the legacy of the enlightenment, of universal values inhering in universal humans. Spaceflight thus has enabled the dominant vectors of the global and its critique.35